Eater’s national restaurant critic is out today with his annual list of the Best New Restaurants in America, and two Bay Area restaurants are among the 18 singled out.

Bill Addison gives high praise to both the city of Oakland, for its “incredibly dynamic dining scene,” and to Nite Yun, the chef-owner of Nyum Bai, whose cooking he calls “a living document of her family’s journey from Cambodia to California, told through rice noodle soups and lacquered beef skewers and stunners like stir-fried minced pork served in a pool of coconut milk, fish paste, and palm sugar.”

Nyum Bai owner and chef Nite Yun is photographed at her restaurant in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, February 17, 2018. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

He waxes poetic about her version of the classic Cambodian dish called amok: “Yun steams diced catfish with coconut milk, egg, and a paste tingling with lemongrass and other spices in a banana leaf. It melds into an oceanic cloud, which Yun returns to earth with a final dousing of coconut milk.”

Our Bay Area News Group’s “First Look” at Nyum Bai in February noted the role that La Cocina, a culinary incubator, played in Yun being able to turn her popular pop-up into a brick-and-mortar. The colorful eatery with a 1960s C-pop vibe uses locally grown, organic ingredients whenever possible.

In San Francisco, Addison found True Laurel, the brainchild of Lazy Bear chef-owner David Barzelay and bar manager Nicolas Torres.

This bar-restaurant hybrid, he writes, provides “a sanctuary for comfort with unusual wit and style, a welcome model” with its “brainy small plates” and “exquisite, unpretentious” cocktails served in an art-installation atmosphere.

“Barzelay and chef de cuisine Geoff Davis bring the smarts with their riffs on Americana bar food: a patty melt crisped in autumnal beef fat, Dungeness and cheddar fondue with potato chips and vegetables for scooping, and fried hen-of-the-wood mushrooms with a riff on sour cream and onion dip.”

Other restaurants making Addison’s list include Momofuku chef David Chang’s first West Coast enterprise, Majordomo in Los Angeles; and Bywater American Bistro, the second New Orleans restaurant from “Top Chef” fan favorite Nina Compton, a James Beard Award winner.